Inclusive Energy Planning is Key to Progress on SDG 7 in Africa
STEER Centre and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) have been collaborating with partners in the Global South for the past decade on an innovative approach to planning energy services - the Energy Delivery Models (EDM) approach.
We have just launched the EDM Hub to provide information and showcase learning on our work – and hopefully catalyse new partnerships.
EDM was developed in response to a critical gap around inclusive approaches to planning investments for a just energy transition.
?The recent World Bank and African Development Bank’s Mission 300 initiative has an ambitious target of connecting 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa to electricity by 2030, ?halving the current electricity access deficit in the region.
Mission 300’s launch is a recognition, first, that Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 on energy for all will succeed or fail in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, that the low-hanging fruit of energy access in the region and globally has been achieved, and progress is stalling.
This trend has been exacerbated by COVID-19, which saw the largest increase in poverty and inequality since 1990 and, together with the impacts of the Ukraine conflict, pushed tens of millions back into energy poverty.
Stalling progress on energy poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
·????? Over 80% of those without electricity live in the region.
·????? Rural electrification is being outpaced by population growth.
·????? Five in ten of those without clean cooking live in the region.
·????? Progress has stagnated for decades, outpaced by population growth.
·????? Only 7% of rural households have clean cooking solutions.
Source: SDG 7 Tracker Report 2024.
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Mission 300 and other large-scale initiatives promote an innovative mix of electrification technologies – with greater investment in distributed renewable solutions – but they remain silent on innovating electrification planning and delivery themselves.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, energy planning tends to be centralised, siloed from other sectors and technology focussed. More inclusive approaches are urgently needed, with energy services designed into local development investments, alongside other forms of support like access to finance and training.
Cross-sectoral planning can realise the full development impact or dividend of energy access. Demand for energy in most cases must be proactively built through additional interventions - particularly for productive activities. But this learning is still not operationalised in planning and delivery of energy at scale?
EDM’s six step process starts by understanding the development needs of target end users – and disaggregating them to promote greater social inclusion. It analyses what factors are preventing those needs being met, which could relate to energy or other, non-energy factors.
The final step is to co-create and implement financially sustainable business models to meet the needs, integrating energy with other supporting interventions and working with other stakeholders, including government and private sector delivery partners.
EDM operationalises the evidence on the need to break out of the energy planning silo, plus insights from the community energy space that participatory approaches can ensure services are appropriate for local needs and contexts.
Greater participation can also help manage community expectations, for instance around how projects will be funded, who will benefit, and identify socio-cultural challenges. All this is critical for building social ownership of energy services, which can be “make or break”.?
One promising development is Kenya’s partial devolution of energy planning to the local (county) government level and its emerging integrated energy planning framework (INEP). The EDM Hub showcases our recent experience working in Kenya on the level of county planning, including under the Sustainable Energy Technical Assistance (SETA) programme (2020-24), training county and national government officials and other stakeholders and developing two County Energy Plans (CEPs). The CEP for Meru County has just been validated by the government.
Our most recent, exciting collaboration is with the 11th Hour Project and its partners in DRC. The first step was a DRC-Kenya Learning Exchange with 11th Hour and our partner the ACCESS Coalition, held in Naivasha, Kenya in July 2024. This brought DRC government officials and civil society together with officials from the Kenyan Ministry of Energy officials and civil society, to learn about Kenya’s integrated planning efforts and EDM.